For a few years now I’ve used Corel AfterShot Pro for RAW processing and image management. It’s simple to use, powerful enough for me, has a great image cataloging system and it runs natively on Linux. But support for it has been lagging recently: No updates, no new cameras support, not much public communication from the development team…

Lately I’ve been looking into alternatives, specially open source ones like darktable. But my problem is that I have done a lot of tagging and cataloging, and all that would be lost if I just switched over. AFP does have a function to save a standard XMP file, but that has to be manually triggered for each photo and, even worse, it saves it with a filename that darktable doesn’t recognize, to say nothing of the mess of keeping two XMP files for each image.

So I’ve developed a Python script that can extract standard XMP data from the AFP XMP file and either embed it into the file or put it in a new file. You can get it at https://github.com/marcoil/afp2xmp, here’s the usage help:

Parasite – “Parasite is a debugging and development tool that runs inside your GTK+ application’s process. It can inspect your application, giving you detailed information on your UI, such as the hierarchy, X window IDs, widget properties, and more. You can modify properties on the fly in order to experiment with the look of your UI.”